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Zones of Maximal Translatability: Borderspace and Women’s Time

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Abstract

Yeung explores Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone, Julia Kristeva’s Murder in Byzantium, and Marina Warner’s The Leto Bundle, attending to acts of border-crossing, both physical and imaginary. Yeung focuses on both physical borders and temporal ones, analysing problems of translation not only between texts, but also in cultural contexts. Adopting Apter’s notion of the moment of maximal translatability, Yeung examines crossroads—border zones where translation breaks down and collides with the exercise of state sovereignty. Yeung’s focus on temporal borders emphasizes the manner in which physical borders create temporal limits as well as geographic ones, creating both physical and temporal points of convergence and permeability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Julia Kristeva , Revolution in Poetic Language . Trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 88. The “infinity of the process”, Kristeva writes, is the “semiotic chora” (88).

  2. 2.

    Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément . The Feminine and the Sacred . Trans. Jane Marie Todd. (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 2. On this page, too, Kristeva defines the project of The Feminine and the Sacred as contrapuntal—a “book in two voices”.

  3. 3.

    Emily Apter , “Women’s Time’ in Theory’, differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.1 (2010), 17.

  4. 4.

    The magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.foreignaffairs.com, accessed June 10–15, 2016.

  5. 5.

    IHS Jane’s Defense Daily: http://www.janes.com/article/61396/nato-recognises-cyber-as-operational-domain-in-move-to-adapt, and http://www.janes.com/article/61318/air-forces-hone-real-world-combat-skills-at-anatolian-eagle-exercise-in-turkey, accessed June 14, 2016.

  6. 6.

    Hürriyet Daily News English: http://hurriyetdailynews.com, accessed June 14–15, 2016.

  7. 7.

    Al Jazeera English: http://www.aljazeera.com, accessed June 14, 2016.

  8. 8.

    Julia Kristeva interview with Ross Guberman, trans. Ross Guberman Julia Kristeva Interviews (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 264–5.

  9. 9.

    On the subject of the contemporary concern with our environment as peripheral surroundings, see in particular Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Harvard: Harvard UP, 2009). For the intersection of these concerns with sovereign power and contemporary communications systems in actor network theory, Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (Oxford: OUP, 2005) and Politics of Nature (Harvard: Harvard UP, 2009).

  10. 10.

    Again, see Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 175: “the environment is that which cannot be indicated directly”.

  11. 11.

    This sentence written with all resonance of Julia Kristeva’s sujet en procès as the subject in process/under trial (see Kristeva, Revolution: 37, and the epigraph to this essay), where subjectivity in the face of sovereign control/definition is inherently affective, social, legal, and above all, mutable.

  12. 12.

    Roland Barthes interview with Guy Scarpetta, “Digressions”, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, Trans. Linda Coverdale (Berkeley: U California P, 1991), 115.

  13. 13.

    Barthes writes “Today I propose this metaphor: the stage of the world (the world as stage) is occupied by a play of ‘decors’ (texts); if you raise one backdrop, another appears behind it, and so on […] a complete mise-en-scène of the plural which derides and dissociates the subject” (“Digressions”, 116).

  14. 14.

    Barthes , “Digressions”, 118.

  15. 15.

    Barthes , “Digressions”, 127.

  16. 16.

    Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 52: “… you will never be able to find some ‘thing’ in between, however close to the boundary line you get”.

  17. 17.

    Julia Kristeva , This Incredible Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Brie Brahic (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), 98.

  18. 18.

    The date given here is for the first French publication of this text by Seuil, which, although published as a partial English translation in 1984 by Margaret Waller for Columbia University Press, has never been fully translated into English. Jardine , for this epigraph, gives her own translation of the French text.

  19. 19.

    Alice Jardine , “Introduction to Julia Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’”, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7.1 (1981), 5–12.

  20. 20.

    Jardine , “Introduction”, 5.

  21. 21.

    Many notes to Kristeva’s work here (including her own) trace the chora (χωρα) back to Plato ’s Timaeus as an “essentially mobile”, “extremely provisional” concept which exists in a zone of radical uncertainty between object-status and being as a mode of language , which defies belief—is at the limits (see Kristeva, Revolution, 25 and 239 n.12). Tellingly, the Timaeus also configures the chora problem outside of the dialectic of “model form” and “model’s copy”: it is a “third kind of form” which disrupts any sovereign binary—thus, it destroys borders and boundaries , is “baffling and obscure […] the nurse of all Becoming”—so feminized—and is “ever-existing”—thus always-already—an eternal feminine. Plato , Timaeus , trans. R.G. Bury (Loeb 234), 113 and 528.

  22. 22.

    Kristeva, Revolution, 88, 85.

  23. 23.

    Jardine , “Introduction”, 5; Julia Kristeva , “Women’s Time”, trans. Alice Jardine , Signs 7.1 (1981), 14.

  24. 24.

    Gérard Genette, Paratexts : Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 2.

  25. 25.

    Emily Apter , The Translation Zone : A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 179.

  26. 26.

    Marina Warner , “In the Time of Not Yet: On the Imaginary of Edward Said” in Conflicting Humanities, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 270. Here, Warner is writing against violence out of Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntalism. The primary example she reflects upon is the nation-spanning conflict-dispelling post-identitarian post-generic musical project of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said—the Western-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

  27. 27.

    For an expansion of Kristeva’s and Warner’s writing out of these events in relation to Murder in Byzantium and The Leto Bundle , see my ‘Against Spectacle: International Terror and the Crisis of the Feminine Subject’ in Peter Childs, Sebastian Groes and Claire Colebrook (eds) Women’s Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts (New York: Lexington, 2015), 51–64. The Preface to Apter’s The Translation Zone opens “This book was shaped by the traumatic experience of September 11, 2001 [… and] the surreal aftermath of that fateful day” (vii).

  28. 28.

    Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness , 275.

  29. 29.

    Warner , Stranger Magic, 436.

  30. 30.

    Julia Kristeva , Interviews, 267.

  31. 31.

    Apter , “‘Women’s Time’ In Theory”, 17.

  32. 32.

    Apter , The Translation Zone , 5.

  33. 33.

    Apter , The Translation Zone, 5.

  34. 34.

    See my “Reading Kristeva with Kristeva”, Studies in the Literary Imagination 47.1 (2014) for a fuller exploration of the contact zone between these conflicting representations (117), and, more broadly, the effects of translinguistic naming and mistranslation in Kristeva’s Murder in Byzantium.

  35. 35.

    See Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness , 6; This Incredible Need to Believe, 47.

  36. 36.

    Julia Kristeva , Murder In Byzantium, 1.

  37. 37.

    See Kristeva, Interviews, 203: “the human condition, insofar as it involves the use of speech, is very fragile […] writing explores that fragility”. In a lecture at the British Academy in 2010, Kristeva updates this vision of the kaleidoscopic, transnational self as “simultaneously itself and infinitely open to otherness: ego affectus est” (“Is there such a thing as European Culture?”, British Academy, London. (24 May 2010), n.p.).

  38. 38.

    See Denise Riley , Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2005), “The impact of violence in the present may indeed revive far older associations in its target” (11).

  39. 39.

    Catherine Malabou , What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), 77.

  40. 40.

    See in particular Kobe Desender and Eva Van den Bussche, “Is Consciousness Necessary for Conflict Adaptation? A State of the Art”, in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012), 3.1–13.

  41. 41.

    Emily Apter , The Translation Zone : A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006): xi.

  42. 42.

    Emily Apter , “Translation at the Checkpoint”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.1 (2014), 56.

  43. 43.

    Dawid Kołoszyc , “The Monstrous Crossroads of Kristeva’s Textual Practice”, Studies in the Literary Imagination 47.1 (2014), 1.

  44. 44.

    Warner , Stranger Magic, 26, 25, 26.

  45. 45.

    As early as Cratylus, the fragile changeability and violent mistranslation of the Sphinx ’s textual and sonorous identity is acknowledged and used as an example of the danger of combining sovereign textual power and what Harold Bloom would call poetic misprision. In conversation with Hermogenes, Sophocles complains: “…the Sphinx , for instance, is called Sphinx , instead of phix, and there are many other examples”. Plato , Cratylus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Loeb 167), 107.

  46. 46.

    Willis Goth Regier’s Book of the Sphinx (Nebraska: U Nebraska P, 2004) catalogues versions and versionings of this profoundly liminal, violent, enigmatic, “nimble symbol” (xviii).

  47. 47.

    Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Loeb 20), 339. Tellingly, where Creon situates the centre of power with the Sphinx and speaks of how the Sphinx ’s song “forced us to let go what was obscure and attend to what lay before our feet”, Oedipus misunderstands, replying how, as sovereign, he “shall begin again and light up obscurity” (339), or, does Oedipus here cast himself in the Sphinx ’s role?

  48. 48.

    The conversation between Euripides and Dionysus in Aristophanes’s (2002) Frogs makes the foreignness (strange music? barbaric language ? hybrid being?) that surrounds the Sphinx , the case of its non-translatability and its obscure origins in mythic time, abundantly clear—see Loeb 180, 200–201.

  49. 49.

    Regier writes at the crossroads of Egyptian and Greek myth how the Egyptian sphinx represents also Horemakhet—the orient—“Sun on the Horizon” (Book of the Sphinx, 3), and also notes how sphinxes permeate Levantine cultures (note here how the naming reflects itself, as levantine etymologically also implicates a rising of the sun from the east), their influential origin myths including Christianity.

  50. 50.

    Regier, Book of the Sphinx, 5.

  51. 51.

    See Anne Carson on the adjective/epithethon, where adjective “is in itself and adjective meaning ‘placed on top’, ‘imported’, ‘foreign’”. The Autobiography of Red (London: Cape, 1998), 4.

  52. 52.

    Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, 275.

  53. 53.

    Marina Warner , The Leto Bundle, 4.

  54. 54.

    Emily Apter , “En-Chôra”, Grey Room 20 (2005), 80. Here Apter is writing of the chora in the shadow of Derrida’s Chora L Works.

  55. 55.

    I refer here to Book IX of the Odyssey. When the drunken Polyphemus asks for the name of his interlocutor, Odysseus does not respond with his own name, rather, tricks the cyclops, by momentarily divesting himself of nominative identity and answering ‘οὖτις’. This ensures that, after Odysseus blinds him, Polyphemus is only able to give a name which is not a name in his complaint; Odysseus’s identity is protected. Oὖ τις (and the subjunctive μή τίς) is rendered in several ways in translation (variously as No-one/Noman/Nobody) and is pronounced, roughly, as Warner renders Ella/Leto’s name: ‘outis’.

  56. 56.

    Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness , 247.

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  1. University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

    Heather H. Yeung

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  1. California State University, San Marcos, California, USA

    Jessica Elbert Decker

  2. California State University, San Marcos, California, USA

    Dylan Winchock

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Yeung, H.H. (2017). Zones of Maximal Translatability: Borderspace and Women’s Time. In: Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (eds) Borderlands and Liminal Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_4

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